DODGERS: Manager Mattingly's job may be on line, but he played cards he was dealt

DODGERS: Manager Mattingly's job may be on line, but he played cards he was dealt

Dodgers manager Don Mattingly watches as the Mets celebrate their victory in game 5 of the NLDS Thursday at Dodger Stadium. Many believe Mattingly could lose his job after three consecutive postseason failures.

LOS ANGELES – As the media massed outside the Dodgers’ clubhouse doors following Game 5 Thursday night, Andrew Friedman and Farhan Zaidi passed through the mob like ghosts, making little or no eye contact and saying nothing as they worked their way into the clubhouse. By the time the doors were opened to reporters, neither was anywhere to be seen.

It was an apt image to end the 2015 season. Since the two (plus Josh Byrnes) took over, the Dodgers have been much like a haunted house – things are always moving around but you rarely saw who was responsible.

And they have been fairly silent on the topic of Manager Don Mattingly’s job security, offering only faint praise for “a very nice job this season” and making no attempts to calm the lynch mob that stalks Mattingly daily on social media. The blood lust for Mattingly’s removal has become such a part of the current L.A. zeitgeist that even actor Rob Lowe fired off a “Fire Mattingly” tweet following the Game 5 loss to the New York Mets.

“We lost the game. Why would you ever think to point the finger at the manager?” catcher Yasmani Grandal said. “Players play the game.”

They do. But the blame/credit allotment usually works this way – players win games; managers lose them.

“We didn’t lose because of Donnie, like everybody says,” outfielder Kiké Hernandez said, echoing the sentiment in the post-game clubhouse. “We lost because we couldn’t score runs. Donnie has nothing to do with this. There’s no reason Donnie has to be fired.”

Actually, there are more than 800 million reasons. The Dodgers’ ownership group has spent more than $800 million in salaries over the past three seasons and has just one playoff series victory to show for it (the 2013 NLDS against the Atlanta Braves). It doesn’t take an MIT degree or experience with Bear Stearns to know an equation like that does not often produce a benevolent, “Sure, let’s try it the same way again” attitude.

In fact, Mattingly’s relationship with Dodgers chairman and controlling owner Mark Walter was seen as already having saved his job over the past three years. But when Walter was approached by reporters after Thursday’s game and was asked about Mattingly’s future, he passed the guillotine to Friedman.

“You can’t hire guys like that and then make the decisions for them,” Walter told reporters.

If Mattingly is indeed fired in the next few days, as the momentum seems to indicate, he will essentially be handed a pink slip for doing what he was told.

The Dodgers’ biggest problems this season – a thin starting rotation and an inconsistent bullpen – were issues of roster construction, not managerial decisions.

The front office couldn’t have expected to lose two starting pitchers to season-ending surgeries – except both of those pitchers (Brandon McCarthy and Hyun-jin Ryu) had giant red flags attached to their medical records. Building a rotation with those two and Brett Anderson, then patching with Alex Wood and Mat Latos, was certainly not Mattingly’s idea. Bullpen construction remains the most unpredictable, metrics-proof job for any front office. That this one didn’t do a better job at it also does not fall on Mattingly.

For the most part, Mattingly used what he was given the way he was told to use it. Lineups, defensive shifts and bullpen usage were heavily influenced – if not totally mandated – by analytics provided by the front office. The consultations were a daily thing, Zaidi acknowledged.

“From Day One, the open-mindedness, the perceptiveness, the pushback has been great,” Friedman said recently. “And I’ve enjoyed the pushback. I’ve enjoyed the debate and not just accepting it because it’s what they perceive that we want. Like most things that are new, it’s better today than it was in April and it continues to evolve.”

Mattingly’s perceived strength, however, was his relationship with the players and his ability to handle the clubhouse. Even that took a hit in the past month. Both Clayton Kershaw and Andre Ethier were caught on camera angrily berating Mattingly in the dugout during games, raising questions about just how much respect Mattingly got from his own players.

“I believe in him,” Gonzalez said after Game 5. “Really, that’s it. I don’t know what else to say.”

There is nothing else to say. Just wait for the furniture to start moving around.

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